There is something breath-taking for me as a child of the late 1970s, who used to communicate with her friends only via the landline and didn’t have a mobile phone until my early 20s, about the exploration of outer space.
The landing of the space-station Chandrayaan-3 on the south pole of the Moon brought lots of excitement not only to the people of India but many of us around the world.
It cost India about $74 million dollars to land their spaceship Vikram on the dark side of the Moon after the two unsuccessful attempts, and it is only half the budget of the Hollywood space blockbuster “Interstellar”.
What a fantastic achievement for India, the country, which has 10.2% of its population living in poverty.
According to 2023 statistics more than 145 million people in India live below the poverty line[1]. Or as CNN correspondent Moni Basu puts it: “the wealth of 16 people is equal to the wealth of 600 million people.”[2] Will these 145 million people, who often don’t know where their food will come from that day, benefit from the Moon landing as well? Will the money, which could have been invested back into Indian society, benefit the less advantaged members of Indian society? Will this amazing and still costly achievement benefit all of humanity or only a few people?
Our technological progress, which we are witnessing through our lives, is, at times, beyond our imagination. We need our moral progress as humanity to be just as strong in order to use our technological progress for the benefit of all the people rather than our destruction.
How can we assure that our technological progress leads to us, living happier and more fulfilled lives rather than being plunged into more wars, destruction and suffering?
If $165 million dollars were invested into American medical care, would it provide more stability and health to the nation than for that nation to watch yet another film sitting on their sofas and missing real life experiences?
Maybe adhering to the moral and ethical laws of the Torah is a good place to start? It is not for nothing the Torah is called a Tree of life. Trees give us food and air to live and so do the teachings of the Torah.
The beginning of chapter 22 in Parashat Ki Teitzei talks about us helping each other. If my ox or sheep go astray, hopefully if our wardens, Andie or Annita, finds it, they either will give it back to me or keep it in their garden until I can collect it.
If Andie or Annita might lose an item and Zane or Jordan find it, they will hopefully give it back to them. These laws in chapter 22 promote, what we would call, “good citizenship by legislating areas of responsibility for what takes place outside of our household”[3]. In essence it promotes trust between people. Trust is a main ingredient of a society’s stability and security. Do our more mature members of the Congregation remember times when the doors of our houses could be left unlocked?
The main reason for these laws specified at the end of verse 3 “we must not remain indifferent”, which is expressed in Hebrew’s verb infinitive “להתעלם”.
Hebrew is a very old and wise language. The same verb in Hebrew also means “to disappear” or “to vanish”. The consequence of indifference can be the disappearance of something or someone.
The Torah scroll Zane has read from can be an example of this. The Torah scroll Zane read so well from today came from a town in the Czech Republic called Sobeslav.
The Synagogue in Sobeslav was built in the 1880s and before the Second World War the community had 13 Torah scrolls. The Synagogue in Sobeslav is where Rabbi Dr. Arthur Katz, father of our Rabbi-Emeritus Stephen Katz, served as a Rabbi. Rabbi Dr. Arthur Katz was one of few survivors from the community in Sobeslav. The whole community was deported to first Teresenshtadt in 1942 and then to Auschwitz in 1943.
So Zane chose to read today from our Czech Torah scroll in memory of all the members of the community who perished in the Holocaust and particularly of all the children who didn’t have a chance to have their bar-mitzvot and read from this scroll.
Could the Holocaust have been averted if people had been less indifferent at the time?
Could more Jews have been saved if people had been less indifferent? For sure and we know today how important it is to not be indifferent and we are often involved with the refugees campaigns worldwide.
But it is always easy to be so vigilant in one’s social aspirations? Is it always possible to care about others the way we care about our immediate family and friends? I think most of us would agree that it is not. Partly, because on a regular basis we get snowed under our own problems; partly because the world is full of conflicts and suffering and at times if feels that the more we help refugees or other people, the more of them are out there needing our help.
Partly sometimes we, as a society, feel apathy towards the path of goodness and righteousness because we of our own insecurities and fears of the economic and personal pressures.
I wanted to look up the distinction between indifference and apathy but could not be bothered!
But when people do care, even a single individual can make a big difference: when I was a lonely foreign student at Leo Baeck College and the members of local communities were inviting me to Shabbat dinners, it made a huge difference to me in my first year. Not just the food mattered but the fact that people cared about me.
It made a big difference that Polish-American Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched together with Martin Luther King in the famous Selma Civil Rights march. Later he wrote: “When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.”
It did make a difference that Theodor Herzl, Austro-Hungarian journalist and political activists, shocked by the anti-semitic Dreifus case in France, reconnected with his Jewish roots and didn’t give up on his dream of creating a homeland for all the Jewish people, where they could feel safe and protected.
It did make a difference that Nicholas Winton, saved 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia at the outbreak of the Second World War. 50 years later, he was invited to the BBC programme “That’s life” in 1988 to meet some of the children he rescued as well as their children and even grandchildren.
Another hero, Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese vice-council on the eve of the Second World War, saving more than 6 000 Jewish lives. Apparently, he continued writing visas on his way from the hotel to the train station when the embassy was ordered to leave Lithuania and even left the copy of his signature and the consulate stamp with some Jesuits in Vilnus who continued issuing visas in his name.[4] As he explained himself about his courage: “It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes … I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people’s lives….”[5]
We can’t help everyone and that’s ok to accept that too but even if each of us can help only one person or few people, that will make the difference not only to them but also to us. We are commanded not to be indifferent to maintain the order in our society and the trust for and in each other. Let’s do it together.
[1]https://scroll.in/article/1048475/how-many-people-live-below-the-poverty-line-in-india-it-could-be-34-million-or-373-million#:~:text=They%20found%20that%20the%20number,or%2010.2%25%20of%20the%20population.
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/10/world/i-on-india-income-gap/
[3] Torah Commentaries JPS edited by Prof. Nahum Sarna, in the book of Deuteronomy, Parashat Ki Teitzei.
[4] https://thedailybeagle.net/2013/03/26/the-japanese-schindler/
[5] Ibid;
